Creative Development in Teacher Education

Abstract

The need for creativity and innovation as an integral part of 21st century skills in education has been widely espoused by numerous government jurisdictions and private organizations, notably Alberta Education’s Inspiring Education (2010) initiative along with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) (2009) in the United States and the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Ananiadou & Clario, 2009). This is often presented in the context of the 4C’s of creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration and communication in a networked, interconnected and interdependent transdisciplinary world (Bocchi et al., 2014). Creativity and innovation are viewed as essential for future students and teachers to deal with increasing complexities of higher education while enhancing creative design practice to enable increased economic and social innovation for emerging and future problems at a variety of levels. Applied educational work in the field of creativity and innovation requires a clear and common vocabulary derived from comprehensive research resources such as Sternberg (1999), Piirto (2004), Kaufman and Sternberg (2006, 2010), Runco (2007), Starko (2010) and Beghetto and Kaufman (2010). A most concise and accessible definition of creativity is Lubart’s (2000), who defines this concept as a sequence of thoughts and actions that leads to novel, adaption production. Runco (2007) defines innovation as the application of creative practice where ideas are introduced and applied to a situation that benefits a job, process, organization or the development of a product. The epicenter of the transformation of educational culture to embrace creativity and innovation lies with a transformation of the professional culture (Kelly, 2012). This implies that teacher education programs nationally and internationally have to embrace a transformation that builds understanding and practice around creativity and innovation into the educational mainstream in a meaningful way. This goes beyond offering traditional courses, lectures and workshops that are about creativity where participants are placed largely in the role of consumers of information. Pink (2005) talks of how we have moved from the information age to the conceptual age. Ideas are the currency of contemporary learning with creativity as the engine (Kelly & Leggo, J.2008). A primary educational challenge is not so much obtaining and accessing information but rather equipping educators and learners with a creative disposition to apply and grow this information in innovative ways across the discipline spectrum. This has informed the design and development of the Creative Development in Educational Practice graduate certificate program at the University of Calgary. It is one of many program options for educators as part of the Interdisciplinary MEd program at the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. The principal focus of this ten-month program is on enhancing the creative development of educators through first-hand research, engagement and documentation of longitudinal, creative practice. This is supported in a highly collaborative environment of idea generation and prototyping. A fundamental understanding here is that the educator must engage in creative practice to grow their own creative capacity and depth of understanding of creative development, in order to educationally enable the creative development of learners